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| Wednesday, August 3, 2005 12:55 PM |
| My exceedingly long review of Broken Flowers |
 by Fëanor |
Last night, courtesy the Philadelphia Film Society, SuperTarzan and I took in a special preview screening of Jim Jarmusch's latest film, Broken Flowers. The film opens by following a letter through the postal system, from the moment it is dropped in the mail box to the moment it arrives at the door of one Don Johnston (Bill Murray). When the letter falls to the floor of his foyer, Don is in the midst of both watching an old black and white film about Don Juan (this one, I suspect), and being walked out on by his latest girlfriend, Sherry (Julie Delpy). Don makes a half-hearted attempt to stop her, but there's clearly not much energy left in him. As we will soon learn, this has happened to him a lot, and he seems to have become used to it. He looks tired, finished, like he's given up on life. He made enough money in computers to retire comfortably, and now he just sits around his nice suburban home all day, with nothing to do but watch TV.
But the letter he's just received is going to change things for him. Sherry saw it on the way out the door, and guessed that it was from one of his other girlfriends. Don protested, but she was in fact correct--the letter is from a girlfriend he had some 20 years ago. In it, she reveals to Don that she had a son by him soon after they broke up, and raised the child with no knowledge of his father, but that now her teenage son is going on a mysterious road trip, and just might be trying to find him.
Don is pretty shocked by the letter. When he reads it, he happens to be next door at his friend Winston's house, helping him with some computer trouble. Winston is a hard-working family man with five kids, three jobs, and a craving for mysteries. So he is immediately fascinated by Don's mysterious letter, which is unsigned and has no return address. Don makes like he's ready to crawl right back into his hole and forget all about the letter, but Winston won't let it go. He demands that Don make a list of all the girlfriends he had back then. Winston tracks each of them down on the internet and sets up the itinerary for a road trip. He intends for Don to go out and see each of the women, to interview them and search their houses for clues (a typewriter, for instance, like the one used to type the letter, or pink paper like the kind it was typed on), in order to discover which one is the mother of his child. But, Don asks, what if his son shows up looking for him while he's away? No problem, Winston says, "I'll apprehend him!"
Don grumbles and complains the whole way, but he's far more interested in his hypothetical son than he'll admit, and needs little real encouragement from Winston to head out on the adventure that becomes the central story of the film.
On the way, Don seems beset on all sides by beautiful women of all ages--Sun Green, the young woman at the flower shop (Winston insists that Don bring pink flowers with him to every house) who attends to an injury he acquired at one of his stops; the constantly gabbling young girls who sit near him on the bus to the airport rental cars; the daughter of Laura (the first woman on his list, played by Sharon Stone), who is all too appropriately named Lolita. And then of course there's Don's old girlfriends--Laura, Dora (Frances Conroy), Carmen (Jessica Lange), and Penny (Tilda Swinton). And along the way, Don also sees the occasional young man on a road trip of his own. He watches these men curiously--could one of them be his son?
Winston thinks of Don as Don Juan (and calls him that numerous times until Don asks him to stop). He says Don understands women. But does he really? He's certainly been with a lot of them, and some of the women he sees on his journey have fond memories of him. But none of his relationships lasted, and he's never been happily married, as Winston is. Some of the women Don meets mistake him for Don Johnson at first, and he corrects them with the air of one well familiar with this error. The movie plays with his name and his identity because, while it is certainly also the story of the women he's known, a story about children and mothers and fathers, a story about love and romance and the end of both, it is first of all an examination of him, of who he is, of who he was, of who he could be.
This is what Jim Jarmusch does; he uses his films to examine humanity, seemingly from the perspective of an alien who's trying to figure out how these Earthlings work. The people in his films are strange--humorous in their oddity (the film has a wonderful, warm sense of humor, which occasionally also turns dark, as in the hilariously agonizing dinner scene at Dora's house). But they are also undeniably familiar, undeniably human.
Stylistically, Jarmusch often goes against Hollywood conventions of storytelling and editing (UPDATE: and scoring, for that matter; the soundtrack is classic Jarmusch--eclectic, a bit repetetive, and really excellent). Whereas a Hollywood film will focus on dialogue and action, Jarmusch often focuses on silence and inaction. Jarmusch tells us a lot about Don by showing him sitting still, doing nothing. There's a particularly interesting scene near the beginning of Don's adventure in which Don does not talk to a beautiful airline attendant that he's sitting next to at an airport gate.
Also (and this is a bit of a spoiler), where a Hollywood film would have solved the mystery at the center of the story, Jarmusch's film does not. The young kid Don has seen skulking about turns out to not be his son. Don never meets his child, never learns who the kid's mother is, never even learns for sure if he really does have a son. At the end of the film, everything is left unresolved. Many of the other audience members found this very irritating, and the film in general disappointing (I could tell because they were pretty vocal about it), but it was a very deliberate choice on Jarmusch's part, and it's one of the things I really love about the film. As Don says to the kid who turns out not to be his (and I'm paraphrasing a bit here), "The past is gone. I know that. The future, whatever that's going to be, hasn't happened yet. So all we have is this. The present."
Jarmusch plays even further with the medium than usual in this film, injecting a bit of a postmodern, breaking-the-fourth-wall type feeling into the proceedings. Don is thrown off when Carmen's "magic" black dog (whose death, she claims, imbued her with the ability to communicate with animals) shares the name Winston with his black neighbor who set him on this quest. There seem to be a number of weird coincidences like that--random little pieces of evidence that aren't enough to clear anything up, but are just enough to keep Don guessing, to keep him on his journey. He wonders aloud multiple times whether this all might be some kind of a trick--a made-up story. Which, of course, it is. It's all just a movie. And a pretty excellent one at that. |
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Jim Genzano's books on Goodreads
